Like Hades with orange skin as seen on the DC One Million comics or the various Greek gods with black skin as seen on the Hades/Hades II video games
You can do whatever the hell you want with enough lawyers.
Can someone own a concept of a public domain character with specific hair/skin colors?
Submitted 1 week ago by ryujin470@fedia.io to [deleted]
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Aight, the answer isn’t exactly clear. It really depends on how detailed you get, vs how willing the given company is to risk resources on an unlikely to win case.
Straight up, there’s something referred to as a campfire principle. Anything mythological is going to fall under it, and the idea is that they were created so long ago, and shared mutually by so many people that copyright can’t exist.
However, the more specific you get in the depiction, the more likely you would be to be able to enforce a copyright. The big example I’ve heard/seen thrown around is Hercules.
Hercules has existed for thousands of years as an idea. The myths are definitely under public domain. So, you’d be damn hard pressed to try and claim a different company/artist violated your copyright just because you also included him in your works.
The only time you’d be able to in print is if you used the name instead of the idea. I could write a book with a guy that happens to be named Hercules, and someone using that character in an identifiable way would probably lose a copyright suit against them.
However, if your story is substantially based on mythology, as in your character is Hercules from mythology, you’d be incredibly unlikely to win if someone else only used a vague description that’s similar. They’d have to take the description word for word to make it a realistic suit.
But, you’re asking about images as much as characters. Those specific images are copyrighted. If you make a cartoon with a Hercules that looks significantly like the one grin the Disney movie, expect the mouse’s cock up your ass, and the courts to side with them. Try printing it on hats, same thing. That goes for comics as well. Once you take things that make the images of a character distinct and reuse them, a lawsuit has standing enough that it’s a bad idea to get too close to the depiction from a big company.
But it does depend on how close you get. If I just make a muscular dude with curly hair and a club, Marvel is going to have a hard time claiming I messed with their version of the character, especially since they change his depiction so much from artist to artist.
So, the Orange Hades from DC might be distinct enough if the costume and other details are also part of their claim. But not solely on him being orange. What it would probably do is make sure nobody else in comics tried to use an orange hades in their publication, mostly to avoid the mess.
The video game, it would be similar. The closer you got to the exact depiction as it shows up on screen, the more likely they would be to win the lawsuit. And, it does matter what the format is, like with the comics. If I draw a comic and my greek gods have black skin, and that’s all I copy, the lawyers might get rich, but good luck to them winning the suit. But if I make a video game and do the same thing, you’re getting up to the edge again, where the similarity of the medium makes it an easier thing to make a good argument it’s substantially derived from the original. But it wouldn’t be a slam dunk.
The reason I’ve looked into this is that I published three books that make heavy use of mythology, and use the same ideas as part of my home brew ttrpg setting and system. So not only did I not want to get sued into oblivion for my Thor actually being inspired by the comic versions of him, but I also didn’t want that to mean anyone could just shit all over the settings and claim it was public domain. So I asked my agent about all this. Back when I had an agent lol. Not only was I covered from comic companies coming at me, I would have some limited protection over terminology and other details of my works, as they applied to mythological entities.
I was advised that if I ever fully described a character that exists in popular media as well as my own works, that I avoid anything distinctive, like the way mjolnir looks or the discs on Thor’s armor in Marvel comics. But mjolnir would still be fine since it exists in mythology already.